View from the Cheap Seats is kind of an extension of the newsroom. Whenever our three regular reporters, Calvin Daniels, Thom Barker and Randy Brenzen are in the building together, it is frequently a site of heated debate. This week: What is your most memorable fair moment?
Limited experience
My dad didn’t particularly like fairs and exhibitions. The games were rigged, the prizes cheap, the food overpriced and the rides a lot of waiting around for a few moments of excitement.
He liked the livestock, but to us city kids that was beyond boring. What memory I have of fairs from my childhood is a lot of unfulfilled desire.
Not surprisingly, then, my best fair memories are from when my kids were young. In retrospect, my dad was right, of course, but I indulged my kids anyway.
Probably the best time we ever had was at an exhibition in Austin, Texas. My boys were about 12 and 10 and had never been to a rodeo. Rodeo is a big deal in Texas, as it is here.
What my boys quickly decided was the matchup between men and animals really wasn’t fair, so they started cheering wildly whenever the little steers got away or the cowboys got bucked. At first, I was embarrassed, but when those two decided something was funny and started laughing hysterically, it was impossible not to join in. Despite some sideways looks from other audience members we cheered for the animals all afternoon.
That was their first rodeo and I think it might also have been their last. It is also very likely the last time I’ve been to a summer fair before this year when I went to cover the RCMP Musical Ride at the Yorkton Ex.
-Thom Barker
Bottoms up
Picking out a favoured memory of attending a fair might be the most impossible assignment possible for myself.
I happen to have spent most of my summers as a youth at fairs, as we showed livestock. A typically summer was ag week in Saskatoon, travel Sunday to get to Yorkton for three days, head out Wednesday to hit Melfort for three days, home for two, then into Connaught for two, onto Nipawin for three, then travel Sunday for Prince Albert and another week-long fair. After than would come Golburn and Shand and then the sad reality it was mid-August and school was again growing near.
I won my first trophy when I was five for showing pigs.
I would be interviewed on Toronto TV at 12 for attending the Toronto Royal. We made the trip on the train.
I was in the show ring at the first Canadian Western Agribition, and every year following for a decade or more.
The Yorkton Ex I showed at from the age of seven or eight until my 20s, and I’ve attended as a reporter for the last 25 years or so.
Add that all up and the memory banks are rather full of fair material.
There was the day the tandem wheels on the stock trailer broke on a pothole and actually passed us on the highway near Perigord, SK. We didn’t make it to Yorkton that year to show, although we drive down for a day. I was young enough I cried at missing the event.
I made friends like Sharon Wallace of Dauphin (now Australia) and had too many water fights to remember.
There were midway carnies I got to know, and numerous Teddy Bears won at a booth where you threw darts at balloons. I recall Sharon ended up with one, a tiger I think.
While not exactly at a fair, there was the day running cement by hand for a new barn floor at Connaught. It was hot, sunny, muggy, and the day after my grad party. It might have been the hardest day of work I ever put in.
Connaught was our local show, dad and I both directors. The swine show was large, and finally winning the Grand Champion Boar Trophy with my Berkshire herd sire was a huge thrill.
Through the years I showed pigs of course, but also calves in some junior classes thanks to Allan Smelt and sons of Carla, sheep, goats, sheaves of grain and even chickens, free range birds caught with a fish net the night before heading to Shand Fair.
But in the end I suppose it comes down to one memory above all the rest.
It was at the Yorkton Ex. We were loading to head out the last day. I was up in our stock trailer, it was large enough we could haul 10 plus head in a number of separate pens, and Ed Schrader who Dad had gotten to know at the fair, told his eldest daughter to get up in the trailer and help me.
As it happens she bent over to fasten a gate, and I made a comment to a young sidekick who traveled with us, that it was a nice bottom.
That would be the first step to marrying the gal. Now as often happens in our world the marriage didn’t last, but hey we still are on talking terms, but while together we did have three kids, and no matter what else, that makes that chance comment the best memory and I realize that whenever I think of my kids.
- Calvin Daniels
Hard of steering
My most memorable fair moment, funny enough, didn’t happen as a child.
Nor did it happen anywhere near the main exhibits, at the racetrack or on the rides, although there is a close second where my friends and I ate as much as we possibly could then, when we couldn’t stuff our guts any more went and rode the Tilt-a-Whirl and spun it as quick as we could.
Suffice it to say that most everyone involved quickly had some more room in their stomachs after a few moments on the ride (except, of course, yours truly).
No, my most memorable moment happened, instead, at the 4-H club’s cattle show, where I wasn’t in 4-H, had no interest in the show (it was over by then anyhow) and was really just there to look at the dumb animals (and the cattle, too! Hey-yo!).
Jokes aside, I was standing fairly close to an empty pen looking at a Yorkton Exhibition program to see what was about to begin, when all of a sudden the left side of my face was slapped by a hot, wet shovel-esque thing.
I turned around to find a big steer behind me in the pen that had previously been empty, staring at me while it loaded up another lick attack, to which it missed because who wants to be licked by a steer?
It’s not my best moment at the fair, but it’s certainly one of the most memorable… and not one I’d like to repeat.
-Randy Brenzen
